Honestly, Instagram makes me lazy. I snap a photo, dual post it to Insta and FB and feel like I’ve done the necessary work to stay connected.

Instagram is great for sharing images but problematic for written ideas. (Unless you are like my husband who has mastered the art of the tiny slidey text predictive keyboard on his smart phone. That stuff makes me crazy.)

Circle Doodle

Maybe I’ll do better with blogging this spring.

Here are photos of some stuff I’ve worked on in 2017. I focused a lot on adding wearables to my product range. Dresses and tunics have proven to be very popular both online and at shows and I’ll be adding tees to my etsy shop later today so we’ll see how those are recieved.

Hand Embroidered Pink Silk Amulet Bag

I’ve also been doing a lot of reading in the past year – I mean, I read ALL the time anyway – but in the last year or so I’ve been reading a lot of books focusing on feminist spirituality, reaxaminations of history from a feminist persepective and partnership based social reform as a means of working through what I’m calling my “Faith Management Crisis.” I’ll talk about that a little later. It is having a big impact on my artistic goals and I’m almost ready to start talking about some of those.

Jersey Kimono in Nebulae colorway

In the meantime, here are some pretties that I’ve created this year. Enjoy!

I have found the brainstorming and non-linear planning approach to be really helpful in the past few weeks. I’m trying to get all of my ideas down without stifling them with a rigid list of checkboxes.

Don’t get me wrong – checkboxes are great and I use those daily but they aren’t very useful when you are

Bubble Planner Page – rough

trying to think through your stress or simply brainstorming to identify your next set of goals and intentions. Meditation and insight comes first and these pages have been helping me with that!

If you want to give the whole non-linear planning thing a whirl, go ahead and download the Bubble Planner page as a jpg right here. (This version is raw – I haven’t cleaned it up at all. It will be part of my next PDF pack over on Etsy soon.)

And don’t worry – I also have scarves and pendants to photograph and a batch of things waiting for the ice. I’m not going totally Black and White and two dimensional on you!

Yesterday was wonderful! Molly arrived home from college this weekend and we woke up Monday morning to a snow day. Ophelia was thrilled to have her whole pack of humans together in the house again.

Ophelia, The Happy Golden Dog

I have been struggling for YEARS to get good photos of my velvet scarves and yesterday I was given the solution. The snow outside my big studio window makes a great reflector for the diffused light of a cloudy day and I got some of the best photos of my ice dyed velvet scarves ever. I listed 5 of them in my Etsy shop yesterday and will hopefully get the rest in today.

Sandalwood and Amethyst malas

I also finished the two Malas that I started working on during Studio Tour and am busy listing meditation jewelry today as well.

If you are giving gifts this season, please consider buying from a real live artist like me. You’ll be supporting an important aspect of the economy and giving gifts made with real love and passion. Remember coupon code FREESHIP16 for all orders from my Etsy shop over $35.00